Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to building security devices, and more particularly to a portable bar arrangement especially designed to prevent a door from being forced open.
II. Discussion of the Prior Art
The crime of breaking and entering has been of increasing concern over the past 20 years due, in part, to the rise in illegal drug usage. Individuals have resorted in increasing numbers to home and business burglary to obtain money or items of personal property that can be sold to raise money with which to purchase drugs. Accompanying this increase is also an increase in violent crimes against persons. Many individuals no longer feel safe in their own homes or in commercial establishments, such as hotels and motels.
A common mode of entry involves kicking in the building's entry door. In most cases, the conventional locksets used on such entry doors have a key-operated bolt which is too short relative to its depth of penetration into an adjacent door jam to resist the force of an adult kicking in the door or lunging at the door with his shoulder. Wooden jams merely crack and shatter with relatively little effort.
Various other devices have been used with doors to make forced entry more difficult. Slide bolts and chains have been used but a determined intruder with readily available tools, such as pry bars and bolt cutters, are able to defeat those measures as well.
Conventional entry door locksets may also be defeated with a simple plastic credit card which, if slipped between the door and its jam proximate the spring-loaded bolt of the lockset, the bolt can be made to retract out of the jam and the door opened.